There are millions of deaf persons throughout the world. Because they are deaf, one of the most common means that deaf persons use to communicate is sign language. Sign language uses manual communication instead of sound to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express fluidly a speaker's thoughts. In this way, the communication can be received visually as opposed to aurally, which is obviously not possible.
Something of which most non-deaf people are not aware is that most deaf persons read or write with great difficulty. Most people who have been deaf since birth have always been exposed to sign language in order to communicate. Sign language has quite a different syntax structure and uses spatial and temporal references in a completely different way than spoken languages. (The difference between sign language and spoken languages is conceptual and is far greater than between even disparate spoken languages such as English and Chinese.) The use of sign language by deaf persons moulds their cognitive abilities into a series of automated processes that their normal intellectual functioning comes to rely on. Reading a written language is something that these automated processes are simply not adapted to do at all. This means that for most deaf persons written languages are an alien form of communication that is mostly incomprehensible, even in basic situations. Indeed, only very highly motivated deaf persons, through years of study and with the long-term help of interpreters, are able to master the skill of reading, and go on to higher education.
Nonetheless, in order to ensure their integration into society, information must be made available to deaf persons in a manner in which they are capable of receiving it. Given that most of these persons do not have adequate reading skills, the information must therefore be available to them in sign language. Conventionally, in order to do this, the services of a sign language interpreter must be engaged, and he or she must interpret either the written or spoken language (as the case may be) for the deaf person(s). The interpretation may obviously proceed in many different ways depending on the situation. It may happen live, it may be simultaneously broadcast, or the interpreter's image may be captured on film or digitally and may be later broadcast and/or reproduced on media that can be physically sent to the deaf person. FIGS. 1a, 1b, 2a, and 2b show examples of sign language interpretation by an interpreter. In FIG. 1a the interpreter 100 is in the process of making the sign “maple tree” (in Quebec Sign Language—the sign language used in French-speaking Canada). FIG. 1b is a side view of FIG. 1a. In FIG. 2a the interpreter 100 is in the process of making the sign “unknown”. FIG. 2b is a side view of FIG. 2a. Note that in the signs in all of these figures, both the facial expression and the hands are used in the making of the signs.
More recently, with increasing advancements in computer science, a new technology has developed: the 3D avatar. Now common in computerized videogames, a 3D avatar is a 3-dimensional graphical image that represents a person in a computerized environment. Much work has been done on computerizing sign language so that as close to lifelike as possible 3D-avatars maybe used to communicate with deaf persons via sign language by viewing the avatars on a screen. FIG. 3 shows an example of a male 3D-avatar 102 in the process of signing. One of the main goals of the development of this technology is to allow automated machine-translation of either spoken or written language to occur, and it is believed that one day this will be an extremely useful and beneficial technology allowing better communication for deaf persons.
FIG. 4 shows an example of a female 3D-avatar 104 being used in the process of simultaneous translation for a news cast.
Nonetheless, neither conventional sign-language interpretation, nor the current efforts to machine-automate sign-language interpretation using avatars, is (or will be) optimal. This because of one main reason that has generally been heretofore overlooked by those working in sign-language interpretation. Written language as a string of characters has the ability to be visually anonymous with respect to its author and to be extraneous-content neutral. That is to say that where a document is written in a standard regular font (e.g. the Times New Roman font of the present patent application), the reader of the document is not exposed to the physical characteristics of the author of the document (e.g. in the case of the present patent application a reader reading this sentence will quickly realize that he or she knows nothing about clothing or appearance of the patent attorney who wrote it, nor anything of the inventors of the invention described herein). The reader cannot therefore make conscious or unconscious judgments about the content of the document in view of anything that he or she could have known if the present written text using characters that were not visually anonymous and extraneous-content neutral (e.g. in the case of the present patent application the patent attorney was wearing a blue T-shirt when he wrote it. A reader whose favorite color is red might therefore have unconsciously looked less favorably towards the present invention had the present written text conveyed that fact somehow (obviously without it being written down as such)),Its ability to anonymize its author is one of the reasons that written text is so well suited to mass communication.
In addition, written text has the ability to be generally distraction-free for its reader. I.e. as long as text is printed in a black standard regular font in a standard size on clean white paper, there will be nothing (on the paper) to distract the reader from the words themselves and to impair the ability of the reader to comprehend the information conveyed by the words.
Conventional sign-language interpretation and the current uses of computerized 3Davatars in sign-language interpretation do not have these benefits. They are not visually anonymous. Even if the actual speaker or author of the words is not viewable by the deaf person, the interpreter always is. The interpreter, being a physical person (or lifelike representation of one), has an important number of personal characteristics (e.g. sex, age, hair color, eye color, skin tone, etc.) that will subtly (or not so subtly) affect the deaf person who is viewing them based on his or her personal preferences, biases or situation. For example, a hearing person desirous of getting a divorce will not have the same reaction to reading a pamphlet on divorce, as would a deaf person having the same pamphlet interpreted to them by an interpreter of the same sex of the person that the deaf person desires to divorce.
Moreover, neither conventional sign-language interpretation nor the current uses of computerized 3D-avatars in sign-language interpretation are distraction-free for the deaf person. As is commonly known, persons losing the ability to use one of their senses generally have augmented abilities of (at least some) of their other senses to compensate. Most deaf people therefore have increased visual acuity and a very acute perception of visual activity. This, combined with the fact that deaf people communicate visually, means that their minds are constantly taking in an exceptional amount of visual information and are attempting to process it to determine its meaning. But there is no meaning in most of it, as our society generally communicates aurally. A large portion of the visual information is therefore simply meaningless. All of this extraneous information is the visual equivalent to loud background noise. Yet it cannot be ignored by deaf people; it must be tolerated if communication is desired. This is a constant distraction to them. It is both tiring and annoying. A rough analogy for a hearing person would be to talk to a person in car on a mobile telephone while the car is being driven at high speeds, with the window open. There would be an enormous amount of background noise that the hearing person would have to take in, determine to be useless, and then ignore, while at the same time taking in the voice of the person speaking, processing the words and understanding their meaning, assuming they can be heard at all. This task of sensory abstraction would not be a simple or easy task, and over time it would become annoying and exhausting. Indeed, most people in such a situation would simply hang up and try calling again later. Unfortunately, deaf persons do not have the visual equivalent of that option. Up until now, they have simply had to learn to deal with this situation. No one has focused on improvements in this area.
In view of these drawbacks, there is a need in the art for an improved method for representing information so as to be perceivable by a deaf person, and particularly one that attempts to ameliorate at least some of the situations described above.